We might pay for our meals in gourmet restaurants with plastic, but how would you feel about eating something that’s fed on plastic? Leonie Butler reports

Whenever people talk about developing a circular economy, the role of design is heavily referenced in terms of ‘designing out waste’. Two industrial product designers in Austria are attempting to build a portfolio on just that. What’s more, they are turning the waste into something entirely edible.

What? Edible for us to eat? Indeed. Ignited by research that showed that fungi can degrade toxic and persistent waste materials such as plastics into fungal biomass, and spurred on by the desire to address global food shortages and the mounting waste plastic predicament, Livin Studio designers Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger have worked with Utrecht University to create Fungi Mutarium, a futuristic container for producing a food product they’ve named ‘FU’.

According to the designers, their role was to “take a lot of notes, pictures and videos, do a lot of experiments and, most of all, ask a lot of questions that seemed just strange to the scientists”, but what they’ve done is turn two problems on their heads to produce one solution.

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Following updated guidance suggesting black plastic be added to ‘not recycled’ lists, the BBC magazine programme has taken a look at the difficulty in sorting such plastic trays, as well as a potential solution.

In the second instalment of our analysis of the cosmetics and personal care industry, Rachel England examines its problem with packaging and considers measures being taken to turn the sector a more attractive shade of green